Clinical Research
Antonio Egas Moniz was nominated for his contribution to science , the lobotomy. He wouldn't be my first or last pick for such a prestigious honor and apparently others feel the same way. In a case of severe poetic justice, the 1949 Nobel Prize winner was shot and paralyzed by a disgruntled patient.
Worried about your child’s exposure to phthalates, the chemical compounds used as plasticizers in a wide variety of personal care products, children’s toys, and medical devices? Phthalate exposure can begin in the womb and has been associated with negative changes in endocrine function.
A new study in The Journal of Pediatrics examines the possibility that in utero phthalate exposure contributes to low birth weight in infants. Low birth weight is the leading cause of death in children under 5 years of age and increases the risk of cardiovascular and metabolic disease in adulthood.…
Thinking of heading down to the Ms. Adrenaline Swimsuit Competition? Not surprising. Sex attracts and naked bodies flaunted for all to see, attract even more. Researchers from four universities across the US and Canada prodded into our sexual habits to answer the question of what characteristics attract us to our mates. The results were published in the journal Personality And Individual Differences, with a trend line showing those with hard bodies, a curvy waist-hip ratio and strong chin lines tend to be better in bed but perhaps more apt to cheat.
Nothng wrong…
From bench to bedside - who is the catalyst? Academics? Pharma? Everybody? Nobody? From this recent spate of articles on progesterone and brain trauma, it's tough to say.
I was waiting in the doctor's office lobby yesterday and an article in the June 15 Newsweek (hey, that's more current than most lobbies) by Sharon Begley caught my eye. Begley is the magazine's science guru, on par with Bernadine Healy at US News and Sanjay Gupta at Time/CNN. I don't really care for any of them, but I suppose they serve their purpose of letting the weekly news magazines' readers feel they've kept up to date…
Neurological diseases including Parkinson's, Tourette's, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), Alzheimer's, and schizophrenia are all associated with alterations in dopamine-driven function involving the dopamine transporter (DAT). Research published today BMC Neuroscience suggests that a number of estrogens acting through their receptors affect the DAT, which may explain trends in timing of women's susceptibility to these diseases.
Rebecca Alyea and Cheryl Watson from the University of Texas Medical Branch investigated how physiological estrogen levels might influence…
Scientists say they have succeeded in treating immune cells in a way that enables them to inhibit unwanted immune reactions such as organ rejection. Their results have now been published in the Journal of Cellular and Molecular Medicine.
The immune system keeps us healthy: day and night it protects us against invading and harmful pathogens. But this fulltime surveillance can also turn into a problem, for example after an organ transplant. The immune system recognizes the new organ as "foreign" and starts fighting it. In the end, the life-saving transplant will be rejected. Until now, only…
Conception is not a meeting of equals, as scientists have said for decades. The egg is a relatively large, impressive biological factory compared with the tiny sperm, which delivers to the egg one copy of the father's genes. However, the lack of parity may be less one sided than believed. A new study in Nature from Huntsman Cancer Institute (HCI) at the University of Utah reveals that the father's sperm delivers much more complex genetic material than previously thought.
Researchers discovered particular genes packaged in a special way within the sperm, and that may promote the…
A group of researchers say they have clarified the role that retinoic acid plays in limb development. Their study in Current Biology says that retinoic acid controls the development (or budding) of forelimbs, but not hindlimbs, and that retinoic acid is not responsible for patterning (or differentiation of the parts) of limbs.
This research corrects longstanding misconceptions about limb development and provides new insights into congenital limb defects.
Gregg Duester, Ph.D., professor of developmental biology at Burnham Institute for Medical Research (Burnham), along with Xianling Zhao, Ph…
Vegetarians must have felt a little left out when hearing stories of startling weight loss by people consuming nothing except bacon and cheddar cheese.
It was only a matter of time before a study came along showing that vegetarians could get thin too. Of course, the secret ingredient was, as always, participants consuming fewer calories than they burned. Again.
But the non-weight benefits are worth discussion. Overweight individuals who ate a low-calorie, low-carbohydrate diet high in plant-based proteins for four weeks lost weight and experienced improvements in…
According to research presented on Monday, June 8 at SLEEP 2009, in the presence of free access to food, sleep restricted subjects reported decrease in appetite, food cravings and food consumption; however, they gained weight over the course of the study. Thus, the finding suggests that energy intake exceeded energy expenditure during the sleep restriction
Results indicate that people whose sleep was restricted experienced an average weight gain of 1.31 kilograms over the 11 days of the study. Of the subjects with restricted sleep who reported a change in their appetite and food consumption,…